For Herr Docktor Jolly


Political interference will cripple climate debate

by: Michael Asten
From:The Australian
December 17, 201012:00AM

THE Gillard government must not repeat the errors committed when Rudd was PM.

THE Cancun climate change conference has come and gone. As expected, it began with a statement from climate scientists on the magnitude of the threat: a predicted sea-level rise of 0.5m to 2m by 2100.

Australia's Climate Change Minister Greg Combet spoke of Australia's commitment to spend $599 million on regional adaptation programs on climate change for poor countries. This may be a wise move since, based on the conference outcomes, few could be optimistic that the global community would succeed in reversing climate change by agreement on decreasing carbon emissions.

Less wise are the Gillard government's promises to introduce a price on Australian carbon emissions next year; we are entitled to ask first whether the government has learned from past mistakes, in particular its failure to countenance and consider a breadth of points of view on which mechanism, and indeed which scientific prediction we should believe.

The recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, which advocates putting a price on carbon, is notable in its absence of endorsement of Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme over a carbon tax or vice versa.

The preferred mechanism for a price on carbon was a matter of some debate - and bureaucratic abuse of process - last year when Clive Spash, then of the CSIRO, wrote a journal article advocating a response to climate change via changes in economic structure, institutions and behaviour, rather than by the introduction of an ETS.

The Spash paper should have been welcomed as an example of the CSIRO fulfilling its six-point charter, which includes agreement for open communication, encouragement of debate on research issues of public interest, the contestability of ideas and demonstration of independence and integrity. Unfortunately, the CSIRO failed both its employee and its employer (the nation). The author was subject to intense pressure from his employer to modify his conclusions after they had been accepted by external peer review, to align them with the policy of the government of the day.

In what will be seen by historians as an outstanding example of political interference in the academic process, Spash resisted the demands for alteration, had his professional reputation traduced by ill-considered claims by Science Minister Kim Carr and eventually resigned his position.

His paper appeared this year in the June issue of the journal New Political Economy, and it is relevant to the present debate in that it questions the cost-effectiveness of an ETS and warns of the "potential for manipulation to achieve financial gain while showing little regard for environmental or social consequences".

A particular irony of this case is that Spash accepts the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming but differed from the 2009 government views on the nature of economic management of such change. Spash now holds a professorial position in Norway, and his work has renewed credibility as the OECD and our parliament consider options for a carbon-pricing alternative or some other mechanism for managing climate change.

Has the government learned from its mistakes of last year? Probably not. The supposedly multi-party Climate Change Committee set up by Combet includes a proviso that members must commit to a carbon price; the opposition has understandably declined to participate under such loaded terms of reference.

I also fear that the quality of scientific advice to the government is likewise loaded so that ongoing studies on scientific parameters vital to the climate debate such as the magnitude of the CO2 and water vapour-related feedbacks in atmospheric warming, the role of solar-magnetic and cosmic influences on climate, and the geological-historical records of cyclic climate change are starved of funding in Australia relative to the munificence of grants available for Combet's regional adaptation programs, or various green energy projects.

And if scientists involved in the foregoing topics arrive at a conclusion inconvenient to government policy, Spash's experience gives us no confidence that they will receive a fair hearing.

Political interference against scientific objectivity is insidious and may ultimately deliver hideous outcomes. It is common in climate change debate for lesser intellects to label those who dare to question present climate science orthodoxy as deniers, making the implicit association between climate sceptics and Holocaust deniers.

Such accusers probably are unaware of the savage irony in this epithet, in that German academics and scientists compliant with government policy were intimately involved in the formulation and development of Nazi racial policy, and, as historians have commented, the Nazi regime brought boom-time conditions for scientists from racial anthropologists, biologists and economists who were able to contribute to this aspect of the regime's policies. Those academics who were outspoken were removed by the Gestapo.

I do not offer these thoughts as being analogous to present climate debate but by way of caution to politicians who may be unwilling to allow debate, and scientists who may be unduly influenced by funding sources.

As a geophysicist my reading and writing leads me to question the level of influence of human-related CO2 emissions on present versus past climate change, and it is of huge concern to our nation's future if we commit to a price on carbon without a parallel high-priority, objective and ongoing scientific effort to quantify uncertainties and natural factors also affecting climate change.

The Cancun predictions on sea-level rises contrast with recent satellite observations on the rate of sea-level change and provide a timely example on the need for scientific objectivity.

A recent peer-reviewed paper by Svetlana Jevrejeva from Britain's National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool, provides a calculation of 0.6m-1.6m by 2100 using a range of climate models. However, these models also show predicted sea-level change rates of 4.2mm-5.4mm a year for the first decade of the 21st century.

I contrast these predictions with just published observations by Riccardo Riva from Delft in The Netherlands and international colleagues who use satellite technology to quantify actual global sea level rise attributable to ice-cap melting in this same decade to be in the order of 1mm a year.

Adding sea level rise due to thermal expansion of the oceans, which I calculate from CSIRO figures to be in the range 0.7 to 1.7 mm a year, we have a result which happens to be about the rate of sea-level increase that has been observed during the past century. In other words, the observational data suggests the problem as modelled may be overstated by a factor in the range 1.5 to 3.2.

Did scientists from the no-longer independent CSIRO (or other competent body in Australia) brief minister Combet and his team at Cancun on this discrepancy and its implications? Are they permitted to make such comment publicly? And how will such observations affect the targeting of our funds on offer for regional adaptation programs?

Until we have confidence scientists can address such issues without censorship or denigration, we cannot have confidence that a price on carbon will be scientifically justified or wisely spent.

Michael Asten is a professorial fellow in the school of geosciences, Monash University.

The above article as originally published on December 17, 2010, contained an error in the illustration of discrepancy between modelled and observed sea level rise associated with global warming. To Riva's observation-based data (quoted as 1mm a year) must be added a term for ocean expansion due to warming, which I calculate from CSIRO data, to be in the range 0.7 to 1.7mm a year. This gives an estimate of total sea level rise for the past decade to be in the range 1.7 to 2.7mm a year. The discrepancy between model and observation then becomes a factor in the range 1.5 to 3.2 as stated above (not 5 as stated in the original). - Michael Asten




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A packet of dry ice for your consumption.

Southern Greenland—warm and ice free!
by Michael J. Oard

Evolutionary scientists have recently discovered evidence that southern Greenland was much warmer and ice-free during an interglacial between one of their dozens of glacial periods.1,2 According to the uniformitarian ice age paradigm, Greenland first developed an ice sheet around 2.5 Ma (million years) ago; at the same time the ice sheets supposedly developed on North America and Scandinavia. However, opinion on the timing of the Greenland Ice Sheet is changing. Some scientists believe the Greenland Ice Sheet developed 7 Ma ago,3 while even more recent research claims it was 30–38 Ma ago,4 or even as old as 44 Ma ago!5 These new results are based on the finding of what are believed to be ice-rafted debris in deep-sea cores in the northern North Atlantic.
A warm, ice-free southern Greenland
The basis of the claim of an ice-free southern Greenland comes from the basal silty ice of the 2 km thick southern Greenland Dye 3 core.6 (Figure 1 shows the location of the Dye 3 core on the Greenland Ice Sheet.) The Danish researchers discovered the DNA of a wide variety of plants and insects in the silty ice in the bottom of the core. They were able to positively identify DNA from alder, spruce, pine and yew, and DNA from yarrow, birch, chickweed, fescue, rush, plantain, saxifrage, snowberry and aspen, which could not be independently identified by different laboratories. They also collected DNA from beetles, flies, spiders, butterflies and moths. As a control on whether they could really measure DNA from the foot of a glacier, they successfully identified the DNA from all the plants recently overrun by a glacier on Ellesmere Island, northeastern Canada. They apparently also found DNA in the basal layers of the GRIP core drilled 3 km deep in central Greenland (figure 1), but they were unable to analyze it.
These plants and insects are indicative of warm temperatures, much warmer than is current for southern Greenland. The average July temperature must have exceeded 10°C, and winter temperatures never fell below –17°C, which is the coldest temperature that yew trees can survive.7 Furthermore, with little or no ice on Greenland, the land elevation may have been about 1 km above sea level due to isostatic compensation,8 making such relatively warm temperatures even more anomalous, since higher terrain is cooler than lower terrain.
Which interglacial was ice-free?

The oxygen isotope ratio to bedrock down the Dye 3, Greenland, ice core. The coarser change of scale below 1,500 m that results in less amplitude to the oxygen isotope ratios in the deeper layer. The top 1,700 m corresponds to the post-Ice Age ice, while the bottom 300 m represents the compressed Ice Age ice and a warmer period before glaciation near the bottom.21,22
The researchers had to determine which interglacial the DNA came from. They reasoned that the DNA had to originate from the last time southern Greenland was ice-free, because older DNA from previous ice-free interglacials would vanish with the establishment of a new ice-free ecosystem. The basal ice is mixed up, as it is in all basal sections of ice cores. So, glaciologists commonly claim that the basal several metres of dirt and ice can be very old. The researchers used four dating techniques, giving results between 450,000 and 800,000 years. According to the astronomical hypothesis ice ages should repeat every 100,000 years and should have been doing so for the past 900,000 years.9 So these dates would place the last melting of southern Greenland to sometime between the 4th and the 8th interglacial before the current interglacial, the Holocene.
The researchers admitted that there are many assumptions and uncertainties behind their conclusions and they cannot rule out the last interglacial as the ice-free time. Their results are contrary to what most researchers had previously concluded—that ice in southern Greenland had melted during the last interglacial.10–12 That would put the age of the DNA between 115,000 to 130,000 years.13 This interglacial was claimed to be 5°C warmer, with a sea level about 4–6 m higher than today. So, a substantial part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, as well as part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, had to melt during the previous interglacial. Hence, many glaciologists have concluded that southern Greenland and probably most of northern Greenland was ice free in the previous interglacial. So, it is likely that these new dates are greatly exaggerated within the uniformitarian paradigm.
Global warming implication
It is interesting that the researchers relate their results to the current global warming.14 They reason that if the last warm interglacial never melted the ice in southern Greenland, then the current global warming, which so far has been only 0.7°C since 1880, will not melt much of Greenland. Andrew Curry states:
‘If southern Greenland remained ice-covered during the last interglacial period, it could mean global warming would have to get much worse before it completely melts away the Greenland ice sheet.’13
This of course depends upon whether the uniformitarian paradigm is correct, and whether the new, but admittedly flawed, dates are accepted.
Creationist interpretation
So much for the evolutionary, uniformitarian interpretation of the data. From a creationist point of view, I would interpret the evidence as showing that Greenland was ice-free for a while after the Flood. Previously I have argued:
‘Since the oxygen isotope ratio at the bottom of the Camp Century core, as well as other Greenland cores … , indicates warmer temperatures, it is possible that snow did not accumulate right away [after the Flood] on Greenland. Being surrounded by quite warm water at the beginning of the Ice Age, glaciation of Antarctica and Greenland likely started in the mountains right after the Flood. It would take some time for the ice sheets to develop over the lowlands.’15
Their results are contrary to what most researchers had previously concluded—that ice in southern Greenland had melted during the last interglacial.
This delay in glaciation would be even longer in southern Greenland, allowing early post-Flood colonization of plants and insects. Furthermore, such warm water at high latitudes surrounding Greenland would keep temperatures much warmer in winter than expected, thus accounting for Yew trees that cannot tolerate temperatures lower than –17°C. It is doubtful whether any uniformitarian scenario can account for such relatively warm winter temperatures during an interglacial in southern Greenland. Greenland truly was green at one time.
The straightforward reading of the Dye 3 ice core supports the creationist interpretation. Figure 2 shows the oxygen isotope profile as being generally proportional to temperature down the length of the Dye 3 ice core. The top 1,700 m, 85% of the ice, represents post-Ice Age ice. The Ice Age portion of the core is represented by the bottom compressed 300 m of ice with a low oxygen isotope ratio. The very bottom of the core at bedrock shows high oxygen isotope ratios. This would represent a warm period, which is where the DNA was found, before the cold period. Notice that there is only one cold period, corresponding to just one ice age after a relatively warm period. This same situation applies to all the deep Greenland ice cores.
In regard to the claim that the ice age cycle of glacials and interglacials started 2.5 Ma ago, Peter Klevberg, Rick Bandy and I analyzed one of those claimed glacial tills dated about 2.5 Ma just east of Glacier and Waterton National Parks in the northwest United States and Canada, respectively.16 The uniformitarian researchers had determined, by relying on a paleosol analysis, that there were about seven glacial till layers alternating with interglacial debris. We determined that the deposits were most likely a huge debris flow deposit that spread eastward from the Parks. We also concluded that the paleosol interpretation was based on questionable assumptions.17,18
Implications for ‘old’ DNA
I would interpret the evidence as showing that Greenland was ice-free for a while after the Flood.
Willersley et al.1 based their conclusions on finding the DNA of the organisms within organic matter in the silty ice. It is claimed that this DNA is the oldest intact DNA ever found.19 What about all the previous claims for ancient DNA found in many organisms, some dated as being millions of years old, clear back to the time of the dinosaurs? All this apparently has been dismissed; scientists have simply assumed such claims are due to contamination since DNA is destroyed within 100,000 years.13 Contamination is probably a rubber-stamp excuse, but I can believe that DNA would be destroyed within 100,000 years, and probably much sooner. But now the new results from Greenland are being hailed as a new record for the survival of DNA! Here we go again; contamination exists as and when required!
Of course, all that ancient DNA (provided there is no contamination) really is not that old. It originated only about 4,500 years ago, either during the Flood or the early post-Flood period.

Hey Doc Hey Doc Hey Doc, don't like facts huh Doc. Getting tired Doc?...this is just round 2.

You are starting to sound like Julia GILLARD, someone that doesn't like a mirror being held up to her.

You wanted facts, you got facts stop whingeing like a little schoolgirl and hiding behind the Big Bad Site Owner huh?

What der yer say about that one Hey Doc?

Porr old Doc, been out in the sun too long. Never mind Doc we all understand. But please....stop being such a cry baby...as the Godfather said, "you can act like a man!"

red baron wrote on Mar 14^th, 2012 at 2:12pm:


Provide links, and a 1 line summary of why on earth you think they support your argument and I will.

I not here to guess how you can misunderstand something.

The reason Doctor Jolly that you do no want to read the articles, IN PARTICULAR, those on the C.S.I.R.O. is because they completely destroy you argument that the C.S.I.R.O. is independent of Political interference.

AND THAT IS THE REAL REASON THAT YOU WON'T READ THEM.

Well Doc, you must have read them with your eyes closed because their own Chief Scientist has railed against Government interference.

The articles I published, was not whether the C.S.I.R.O. was pro or against any environmental issue but THE FACT that they are being directly interfered with BIGTIME by members of the Federal Labor Government.

red baron wrote on Mar 14^th, 2012 at 2:50pm: